5 Answers

Today my mother was the target of a "Jamaican Publisher's Clearing House" scam. They told her she had won 7.7 million dollars, but that she had to send them $ for the fees. Fortunately, my mother is suspicious of everyone and will not tell them a thing, much less send them money. She told them to send the guys with the check and balloons and when they got to the apartment office with her check she would give them a check. They tried to get info from her & she told them if they were PCH they would have the info.I go to her apartment daily, so when I got there, I pulled the number off the caller ID. I filed a police report, a report with the FTC and called PCH's fraud hotline. If nothing else, perhaps I have caused the scammers a little problem.I also read to her some things I pulled up online. A man in Chicago (IL has very strong laws against people who target the elderly) had been taken advantage of and his kids could not stop him from sending money. They had holds put on his bank accounts and wire transfers. Seems their father's info had been sold from 1 scammer to another. The people even threatened to shoot the kids.One thing I want to warn people about tho. Even if you get the number off the caller ID, do not call it. The call we received was from Jamaica. You don't want to place an international call & in case they are just cold calling numbers you don't want to give them yours.For the lady from MI. Call your state attorney general's office. They are interested. Also file an online complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. They too are interested in stopping scams, especially scams against the elderly (and for some reason) the military.

I thought of something else. In terms of stopping a scam company from gaining access to Mom's checking account. We have a joint checking account. I do not have Power of Attorney as my Mom doesn't own property. All of her personal belongings are in my house. She has no outstanding bills. I do have health care power of attorney. I wonder if that is enough?K

My father received calls from Jamaica (out of US jurisdiction) telling him that he had won piles of money and a new Mercedes but that he had to send money. I live 2,500 miles away, monitor and have control of his finances, but he would go and withdraw cash from his account, go to the grocery store and get money orders, and send them all over the world. I couldn't figure out where all his money was going. I made a trip to his home and found a folder labelled "sweepstakes." My heart sank when I realized what he had done. He justified it by saying that I would inherit his winnings! It was pathetic. I had the phone number changed. I made it an unlisted number. The calls stopped for awhile but then started up again. My father likes to play practical jokes, so after I convinced him that playing out of country sweepstakes is illegal (it is), I had him tell callers, when they asked for him by name, that he was sorry, but that person had died! He loved the playacting, and fairly soon, the calls stopped. It was harder to stop the mailed offers, but I wrote notes on his daily calendar saying things like, "you don't get something for nothing," "you've worked too hard for your money to give it away," and other things that he had told me over the years. It is a constant battle, not easily won. I went to the police and asked them to help, and they said, "Lady, we'd like to help you, but there were 80,000 cases of elder fraud IN MICHIGAN in 2008. We expect it to be 100,000 in 2009. Scamming senior citizens is the only growth industry in Michigan." They were not help. It's just so important to try and try and try again to get the senior to recognize that these scams never pay off. It's very difficult!

My mom in her 90s was responding to scams. She too thought she would win something. Fortunately, I was able to stop a check before it went through. After that I began collecting solicitations. Then, I boxed them up and returned to sender. I put the same return address on the box as send address. In other words the box would not be returned to me. For a while the solicitations stopped coming. Now, Mom lives with us; she can and has written checks for things but I have to "take them to the post office"...so I'm in charge.I hope this helps.

I had this problem with my mother. As I had Power of Attorney over her checking, I put stop payments on any checks she wrote over $1000 (yes, $1000). If she received any "gifts" in advance, I returned them without opening them. Then, since I was living with her, and the phone and house where in my name, I changed our phone number and got an unlisted one, and I added her to my Post Office box, so the junk mail would go to the box and I could throw it away. That stopped the junk mail. However, I waited until she went to a nursing home for rehab after breaking her back, before I did the latter two things. I did not do anything sooner, because she said that if I touched the pile of junk mail on the table (and there was letter after letter from the same scam company), she said she would call the police on me if I tried to throw things away. At that time, she would have been able to do so. Prior to doing this, my attorney suggested that I take any resources out of my name should anyone try to sue me since assets were in my name. The only thing I took out of my name was to put her car, which was in my name, into her name. And that was another matter, trying to get her to stop driving.

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